The impact of lexical stress type and position of a vowel within a phrase on vowel formant bandwidths

The article sets out to explore the impact of different types of lexical stress and word position within a phrase as well as the interaction of these factors on formant bandwidths. The findings contribute to establishing the role of these formant features as acoustic correlates of the Russian lexical stress. The experimental material for analysis is presented by the Russian sound [a] embedded in a word in a natural language carrier phrase. The word position is changed from phrase initial to the phrase final one and in each position the target word is uttered with a neutral and an emphatic stress by four speakers. The Praat software is used to extract the mean values of the first four formant bandwidths of the target vowel. Two-way ANOVA is carried out to establish the significance of difference between neutrally and emphatically stressed vowels in all the three phrasal positions. The impact of phrasal position and stress type is clearly pronounced and is valid for all the four speakers. Specific trends in bandwidth alterations are hard to identify in most cases because of inconsistent fluctuations of formant bandwidths and a heavy influence of the speakers’ idiolects: formant bandwidths expand, contract or remain unchanged. An explanation of the results obtained is suggested.